A section of empty seats is seen at Cowboys Stadium before Super Bowl XLV. The seats were deemed unsafe before the game.

Now the Dallas Cowboys owner, his team and the NFL face a class-action lawsuit from a group of fans among the 1,250 whose Super Bowl XLV seats were deemed unsafe by safety officials and unusable by the NFL.

Los Angeles-based attorney Michael J. Avenatti, a Cowboys season ticketholder who attended Sunday's game, filed the federal lawsuit Tuesday in Dallas and seeks $5 million in damages for the plaintiffs. The suit alleges breach of contract, fraud and deceptive sales practices.

"A number of people approached me expressing disgust with the seating situation," Avenatti said by phone Wednesday. He added the lawsuit was filed after the NFL announced its revised offer to the displaced fans.

For the 400 fans left without seats, the league is offering two options: a ticket to the 2012 Super Bowl and $2,400 (three times the face value of their tickets) or entry to a future title game along with round-trip airfare and lodging accommodations.

Avenatti called the NFL's offer "wholly insufficient," because it does not compensate for out-of-pocket expenses, such as travel.

Attorney Michael J. Avenatti's firm provided this photo from Super Bowl XLV that shows some of the displaced fans in an obstructed-view section of Cowboys Stadium.

"When Visa contacts many of these fans to get payment for their credit card bills, the fans won't be able to respond with a promise of payment in the future as the NFL has offered," Avenatti said.

Avenatti estimated the lawsuit to cover 1,000 fans, 600 of whom are in Cowboys Stadium's "Founders" group and were placed in obstructed-view seats on Sunday. Each Founder paid $100,000 for a personal seat license and the right to buy season tickets when the venue opened in 2009.

The lawsuit claims that the personal seat licenses earned more than $100 million in revenue for Jones.

"Nobody is looking to get rich from this, nor should they be," Avenatti said.

"This is really simply all about the NFL and Jerry Jones being required to step up and do the right thing."

The NFL did not comment on the lawsuit, but spokesman Greg Aiello said the league was focused on reaching out to and compensating the affected ticketholders.

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